Ubuntu to switch back to Gnome for 18.04LTS

Nope, it’s not April 1st anymore!

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/

What do you guys think? Will any of you miss Unity?

My desktop:

Looks like Unity, actually Gnome Shell. So the Unity feel doesn’t have to go away.

More thoughts on the wider ramifications of this topic once I’ve digested it a bit. Also, you can be pretty sure that this will come up in discussion in the next show we record, although inconsiderately they put this news out after we’ve already recorded tomorrow’s show :wink:

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Wow that’s big news.
I guess that means that Mir will probably cease too? If so that means that the Wayland protocol can replace X for all?

I think Unity did do something good. That it raised the bar and showed that Linux really needed to up it’s game in terms of UI/UX.

I switched to KDE a few years ago though so I won’t miss Unity personally.

Yeah I think this was always the argument (that Gnome could just be re-shelled).

Before moving to Canonical I used Gnome 3 all the time and really liked it, certainly more than Unity 7. The shame is that Unity 8 really looked nice from not just UI but UX too.

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Did you also try to emulate some of the behaviour? Personally, I love the HUD for applications like Gimp, Inkscape, Kile, etc. They have extensive menu hierarchy, and I only use them occasionally. This seems like it might be difficult to pull into gnome, no?

Frankly I’m not sad to see Unity go. I started using Ubuntu on the desktop in 2005 and stopped in 2009 or so. I still had Ubuntu installed on various machines after that but Unity never felt as responsive as I would have liked. I’m not sure why but it always ran horribly compared to the old Gnome desktop I’d come to love.

I still run Ubuntu on servers but I can’t abide Unity. It made whatever hardware I threw at it feel ancient.

I don’t have the HUD. I miss the HUD.

I would guess that it gets ported across

I prefer the CLI and APIs for everything. But It’s a good move from them to stop Unity, because it was everything but. I hope they can refocus the Unity team to, for example, Virtual Reality and/or Voice Recognition on Linux.

Since 2005 i used ubuntu on the desktop, switched to Mint in 2012. I’ve just gone back to ubuntu gnome after some mishaps using Suse the past few months (thanks, Bryan Lunduke for making me ;-).
Very happy hearing the news of Ubuntu going back to gnome, hope it will bring them focus again.

Disclaimer, I use Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and CentOS happily on a variety of servers.

I for one used Unity and enjoyed it on the laptop. But I think Gnome3 is also awesome, so not feeling too bad.

I liked Mark Shuttleworth’s letter. I think he was very honest in that is was just not working out. It was a great try, but looks like it is time to move on. I will miss the flame wars with other WM users :smiley:

Very very worried about Mark’s statements on the community recently. Hard to argue with too, we really do have a massive problem with vocal negative minorities in our community. Worried that Canonical is cutting its losses with the Linux desktop entirely, or at least winding down its leading role.

saw this on unfolded comics today.

http://theunderfold.com/2017/05/26/gnome/

FYI, not long after the 18.04 target, they announced this will hit 17.10 first. Which makes much more sense (even though it’s soon) so they can get more testing done before the LTS release.

I never liked Unity, so no, I won’t miss it :slight_smile:

But saying that I can understand why people do like it and I’m fine with that. I like Marmite and coding in C so I’m partly batshit crazy and probably shouldn’t be listened to :smiley:

It will likely live on for a while in forks and Gnome/KDE emulation of behaviour for people who miss it. That is the great thing about Open Source. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an unofficial Ubuntu fork with Unity (or at least an emulation of Unity behaviour).

I’ve never liked Unity either but saying that many people do and it has certainly improved since it was first introduced so I’m sure some people will miss it

There is nothing wrong with coding in C but Marmite? I can’t stand it but if it works for you fine :smile:.

I doubt the Unity desktop will be removed from the repositories so even if it is not a fork the Unity desktop should not be hard to install for those who want it.

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